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Flora Jia
USC '24 | Computer Science & Applied and Computational Mathematics

Furong Jia (Flora Jia)

Undergraduate student in University of Southern California majoring in Computer science & Applied and Computational Mathematics. Active learner and researcher in computer science fields.
Current research interest: Natural Language Processing, Time series forecasting, Continual Learning, Multimodal machine learning, Data Mining, Large Language Model, Parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Publication

Education

University of Southern California

Aug. 2020 - May. 2024

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Bachelor of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics

GPA: 3.97/4

Awards: Dean’s List, Academic Achievement Award Scholarship, ABC Innovation Prize

Fellowships: Provost’s Research Fellowship, CURVE Research Fellowship

Honors: W.V.T. Rusch Engineering Honors Program

Teaching: CSCI 270 (Algorithms and Theory of Computing), ITP 104 (Web Publishing)

Research Experience

Melady Lab May 2023 -- Present

Research Assistant | Python, Pytorch, Hugging Face, Shell

Los Angeles, CA

Projects & Contributions:

1. Prompt-based Large Language Model for Multimodal Time-series Forecasting

  • Established a pipeline for proposing multimodal time series dataset to improve time series forecasting lending the ability of Large Language Models (LLM), submitted a paper to EAAI-24 as the first author.
  • Pre-processed, analyzed, and established a new multimodal time series dataset on the news using GDELT database and incorporated textual information from related news articles through LLM models.
  • Compared state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series forecasting models, and proposed our model (GPT4MTS) by treating textual information as prompt to improve performance.

2. Large Language Models (LLMs) for Time Series

  • Collaborating with Ph.D. students to assess the potential of utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) for time series tasks through prompting and decomposition, aiming for building foundation model lending LLM.
  • Introduced and employed selection-based prompts to enhance distribution adaption in non-stationary time series.
  • Actively engaged in the complete research cycle: from initial architecture design and implementation to experimentation, visualization, in-depth analysis, and paper drafting, submitted to ICLR-2024 as the second author.

3. Causal Benchmark in Treatment Effect Estimation

  • Collaborating with Ph.D. students to examine the influence of causal components on current models for treatment effect estimation.
  • Researched and implemented dataset under static setting, experimented and analyzed the effect of the causal components of various models, drafted and compiled findings aiming for a conference submission.
GLAMOR Lab Aug. 2022 -- Present

Research Assistant | Python, Pytorch, Hugging Face, Shell

Los Angeles, CA

Projects & Contributions:

1. Initializing Adapters with Improvised Knowledge for Multimodal Continual Learning

  • Collaborated with Ph.D. students on a multi-modal continual learning project to enable parameter- efficient knowledge transfer through adapters on question answering tasks.
  • Implemented multiple vision-language tasks, including GQA, COCO-QA, AQUA, trained and imple- mented model architectures to test various settings to enhance forward transfer and reduce knowledge forgetting, resulting in a co-author publication presented at CoLLAs 2023.

2. Prompting Methods for Domain Shifts in Multi-modal Continual Learning

  • Initiated and currently leading a project exploring the use of prompting methods for visual question answering tasks in multi-modal continual learning.
  • Proposed, executed, and analyzed various methods, actively working towards a conference submission to share the findings.
Interaction Lab Aug. 2021 – Present

Research Assistant | Python, Pytorch, DeepLearning, Bash, Linux, Github, AWS, Vue.js, Firebase

Los Angeles, CA

Projects & Contributions:

ASD Behavior Recognition Project

  • Collaborated with Ph.D. students to develop a large-scale, real-scenario dataset for recognizing children's behaviors, receiving Spring 2022 Provost’s Research Fellowship.
  • Preprocessed, annotated, and detailed children-robot interactions within the dataset, trained and applied state-of-the-art (SOTA) action recognition models to the dataset, with a focus on refining and comparing various sampling methods.

Developed, updated and migrated Interaction Lab Website, and professor’s personal website by using Vue.js for front end and Firebase for back end.

Work Experience

Galileo Financial Technologies, SoFi

May. 2022 -- Aug. 2022

Software Engineering Intern | Python, Flask, HTML/CSS, TypeScript, Gitlab, CI/CD, lit-element

US Remote
  • Independently designed, developed, and tested micro-services in Flask and Python to support authentication and retrieve account information from database, and generated scripts for Continuous Integration through Gitlab
  • Independently designed, developed, and tested account-information-component that create web components to display account information card using lit-element framework in HTML/CSS and Typescript

Kalends Software Shanghai Ltd

Jul. 2021 – Aug. 2021

Technical Developer Intern | HTML/CSS, Angular.js, Node.js, Ionic framework, Gitee

Shanghai, China
  • Developed homepages, login, and signup pages indepently through HTML/CSS, Angular.js, and Ionic framework to assist the front end development of an internally used mobile application
  • Utilized Gitee to contribute in the development and modification of “Shanghai Hezhang” project using HTML/CSS, Angular.js, and Node.js: setting up service, modifying layout, and adding new functions such as loading animation and notification for system update

Projects

Text-Meme-Prediction

Oct. 2022 -- Dec. 2022
Python, Natural Language Processing, Hugging Face, tkinter
  • Researched on the current gap of text meme prediction, selectively implemented and trained SOTA model (RoBERTa) on sentiment analysis over GoEmotion dataset, collaboratively developed pipeline for suggesting top-K memes from user’s meme library based on current text, and implemented GUI using tkinter package under Python

Github Repo

Ctrl-F

Aug. 2021 – Present
HTML/CSS, Javascript, Vue.js, Axios, Webpack, Firebase, Java Spring boot, README
  • Cofounder of Ctrl-F, a web platform that bridges students and faculties over research and internship opportunities to cover the blank of similar products in the current market
  • Developed all Front-end pages through HTML, CSS, Javascript, Vue.js, enabled user authentication using Firebase, connected front-end with back-end through Axios and Webpack, and deployed through AWS
  • Collected professors’ and students’ feedback over the platform to design and develop new functionalities: adding google sign in/up options, allowing users editing own profile and adding affiliated organizations , enabling fast and global searching with multi-layer filters by implementing Elasticsearch

2BotOrNot2Bot

Oct. 2021 – Dec. 2021
HTML/CSS, Javascript, Vue.js, Firebase, Axios, Webpack, Java Spring boot, AWS
  • Cooperatively developed 2BotOrNot2Bot, a web platform to test chat bots for companies by pairing users with chat bots for Turing test
  • Developed all Front-end pages through HTML, CSS, Javascript, Vue.js, enabled user authentication using Firebase, and connected front-end with back-end through Axois and Webpack
  • Applied chat bots API to 2BotOrNot2Bot using Java Spring Boot code and deployed the web platform through AWS

SCourse

Nov. 2021 – Mar. 2022
HTML/CSS, Javascript, Python, Django, Web scraping, Heroku
  • Developed and Deployed SCourse, a web platform implemented through Python with Django framework which generates a full schedule according to students’ input course numbers and their preferences of starting time and rate of professor
  • Gathered course information from USC class website and then implemented course arrangement for lectures, discussions, and quizzes to display the most prioritized result

Skills

Programming Languages:

C++, Python, Java, C, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Swift, Visual Basic

Technologies/Frameworks

GitHub, Gitlab, Vue.js, Angular.js, Node.js, Java Spring Boot, Firebase, Axios, Webpack, Figma, Ionic framework, LaTeX, Pytorch, Bash, Linux, Django, Flask, REST API, Heroku, Web scraping, Andriod Studio, Hexo

Languages:

Chinese (Mandarin), English